Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @11:01AM
from the love-a-little-alliteration dept.

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton summarizes his essay by saying "Spammers really do lie more often under oath than other parties in court (surprise). Judges and prosecutors could promote respect for the law by cracking down on it, and maybe make a dent in spam in the process." Read on to learn of his experiences with (shocking!) spammers who lie in court.

I'm sure everyone feels like their opponents in court are the most
reprehensible liars that ever walked the face of the Earth.
But these instances seem unusually clear-cut even for a courtroom:

When I sued
one Ohio company
for sending me spam, they sent a letter to me (and, when that
didn't work, to the court) claiming that someone had dropped a business card in their box
at a trade show with an e-mail address one letter different from mine, and they must have
mis-read the address when typing it in. They didn't know that
after I first got their spam, I
called them pretending to be an interested customer, and tape-recorded a conversation with
their advertising manager, pretending to be impressed and asking him how he did it (I was in
Arizona, so it was legal to tape the call). He
admitted that he used a program to scrape e-mail addresses from Web pages into
a list and spam them from his desktop.

A spammer who lived in Washington appeared in court and claimed that he had never sent the
spam in question and wouldn't know how. I then produced a
tape recording of another conversation
in which I had talked to him on the phone, again pretending to be an interested customer, and
he talked about sending the mails from a server in China to make it harder for people in the
U.S. to block them.

One company called
"Lions Pride Enterprises"
actually sent a representative from out of state to tell the judge, "I can tell you, under penalty
of perjury, that we looked up the address bhas (at) speakeasy.net in our records, and verified
that he had signed up for our list via confirmed-opt-in" (this was right after he explained to the judge,
more or less accurately, what confirmed-opt-in meant). Except the mail hadn't been sent to
bhas (at) speakeasy.net, the headers showed
it was sent to bennett (at) peacefire.org and then forwarded to
bhas (at) speakeasy.net. Presumably the spammer just looked at the first address they could find
in the headers and assumed that's the one they had mailed, and claimed that address had "opted in."
(Much later, this same company apparently branched out into
infecting people with spyware.)

A spammer from Michigan called in to the court hearing by phone, to defend against charges that he'd
sent me a spam advertising credit card processing services, and claimed, "I don't even sell merchant
accounts." (He lost, due to inconsistencies in his story -- the judge in that case was unusually
tech-savvy.) A
few weeks later, the same guy sent me another merchant account spam, so I sued him again, and this
time he called in to the court hearing (with a different judge)
and admitted that he'd sent the spam, but claimed it was legal.
I tried to challenge his credibility on the grounds that he'd testified under oath earlier that
he "didn't even sell merchant accounts," but the judge said I wasn't allowed to bring that up.

Meanwhile, I've sat through dozens of other people's Small Claims cases, and
I've never seen anyone in a non-spammer case get caught really, brazenly lying under oath.
Of course, it always seems more egregious when it's your opponent -- but
I probably would have noticed if someone had gotten tripped up by a physical document or a recording
of their own voice.

The traditional cost-benefit analysis of prosecuting people who lie under oath in a civil trial
is that it's just not worth it. The King County Prosecutor's office responded to my inquiry to say
they could not recall any instances of someone prosecuted for perjury committed in a civil
case. It is not true, by the way, that civil perjury is never prosecuted — when this
assumption was making the rounds in 1998 during the Clinton perjury controversy,
Professor
Stephen Gillers of NYU published a
list of counterexamples
-- but he conceded in an e-mail that it's nevertheless highly unlikely.
Perhaps this makes sense for most trials, where parties come from a general population that
includes some honest people and some dishonest people, and even dishonest people often just bend
the truth to a degree that outright lying would be hard to prove.
(Although I still think it's possible that the costs of prosecuting people who lie under oath
in civil cases, might still be outweighed by the benefits of having everyone be
scared into being a little more
truthful in court proceedings.)

But spammers are different. In the U.S., all spammers are liars
— either they are lying to their hosting provider about what they're doing, or, if they have a secret
agreement with their provider to avoid getting kicked off, they are complicit in their provider lying
to the rest of the world by claiming that they don't allow spam to emanate from their network. (I'm
assuming that 100% of U.S. providers at least claim not to allow the sending of spam.
This may not be true of the entire world.)
Those lies in themselves can't always be punished in court —
I can't sue a spammer for lying to their service provider — but I think that courts just
haven't realized that all spammers are liars to some degree, and they're
more likely than average to lie under oath. This may make the cost-benefit
analysis different in the case of prosecuting spammers who get caught lying. You wouldn't need a
"spammer perjury law"; there are already laws against perjury, if judges wanted
to enforce them.

Courts could start with deterrents that don't cost anything. All judges start out their
Small Claims hearings by laying out the rules. Some of them include some very stern admonitions about
parties
not interrupting each other or the judge (one judge, who possibly had a bad morning, started the
afternoon session by threatening
to have anyone thrown in jail who argued with him). But I've never
seen a judge say anything about being strictly required to tell the
truth under oath, with penalties for lying that theoretically
include jail time. And if someone does get
caught lying, the judge could reprimand them as strongly as possible and stop just short of recommending
a criminal prosecution. "Oh, wow," you're laughing, "a stern reprimand! That'll teach them!"
But that's what judges do to people
who interrupt the judge or each other, and it does get people's attention.

In the examples above, what was surprising was not that the spammers lied to the court but that the
judges seemed so blasé about it.
In the first case, I had gotten spammed by an Ohio company called SAY Security. After I filed the
Small Claims suit and served the papers on them in the mail along with a copy of the spam,
I got an e-mail
from the owner, Jason Szuch, claiming that they had received
a business card at a trade show with 'bnas (at) speakeasy.net' handwritten on it, and accidentally
replaced the 'n' with an 'h', and that's how I had gotten their mail. They later made the same claim
in a letter to the judge.
At the trial, SAY Security didn't show up, so
I first pointed out that the e-mail had been sent to bennett (at) peacefire.org and
automatically forwarded to bhas (at) speakeasy.net, so it was another case of the spammer
mis-reading what address it was sent to, and coming up with a story after the fact.
I also had a recording of a
conversation with SAY Security's advertising manager, in which he explained
how he used a program called Email Extractor to scrape e-mails from Web pages and send the ads.

At that point, the judge thought he had me: You're not allowed to record phone calls in Washington without
the consent of all parties. I told him that I knew this, which is why I had made the call and recorded
it while I was visiting my Mom in Arizona, which has no such law (and neither does Ohio, which was where
the other party was — in order to secretly tape a phone call, it has to be legal in both the
caller's state and the call recipient's state). The judge still said I couldn't use it as evidence in Washington.
This raises an interesting question. My understanding is
that the rules of evidence in Washington don't say "You can't use a secretly taped phone call as evidence."
They say, on the one hand, "You can't secretly tape a phone call in Washington,"
and on the other hand, "You cannot
use evidence that was obtained illegally" — but if the call was taped in Arizona and then brought to
Washington, it wasn't obtained illegally. I compared it to winning money by gambling in Vegas and then
bringing it to Washington to pay the Small claims filing fee — what difference does it make
that gambling is illegal
in Washington? Oh well, different judges probably would have come to different conclusions on that.

But the real point is that even if the judge
did think the recording was inadmissible, couldn't he have still said something
like, "Well, if the court did admit this evidence, and if these defendants were here, then they could
very well be arrested for perjury — if they were here, I'd tell them that they just had a really close
call." At least for the benefit of everyone else who was in the courtroom,
waiting for their case to be heard — send
a message that the court does care if you get caught lying. As it was, he just shrugged it off, and I got
a default judgment since SAY Security didn't show up.

The second case was against a spammer named Joe Spies,
who did live in Washington, and who came to court claiming that he
didn't know how to send spam and had never made anyone an offer to send spam for money.
Again, I had a recording
of a phone call in which I pretended to be an interested customer, and he said he could send
"5 million e-mails for $500" from a server in China. (This time, since both parties were in Washington,
I used a phone number I had specially set up so that people who called it would hear a disclaimer saying
"Your call may be monitored or recorded," before it forwarded to my home phone.) Judge Karlie
Jorgensen said that
even with that phone call, there was not enough evidence that the defendant had sent the e-mail.
(This
was also the case that I
wrote about
when I filed a motion with the middle two pages stuck
together in the center,
and after the motion was denied, I went to the courthouse and saw that the pages were still
attached, so I knew that she hadn't read it.)

Lions Pride Enterprises was the other company who sent a representative claiming that they had
sent the mail to bhas (at) speakeasy.net and saying, "I swear under penalty of perjury [he was already
sworn in, but repeated it presumably for dramatic effect] that I checked personally,
and the address bhas (at) speakeasy.net subscribed to
our list via verified opt-in," even though the mail had actually been sent to bennett (at) peacefire.org.
This was my first spam case, so at the hearing I stuck to my script and I didn't think to point this
out to the judge. But if the courts took a harsher view of defendants lying under oath, maybe
it would have
been worth the time to write a letter to the judge later after I realized the defendant
had lied. (In theory, you can be prosecuted for lying under oath even
if it's not discovered until after the original trial is over -- since "in theory" is the only
place where spammers are punished for lying under oath anyway.)

Finally, in May 2008, a spammer in Michigan named John Tucker called in to a court hearing in which I'd sued
him for sending me more spam advertising merchant accounts, as well as the company, Pivotal Payments,
on whose behalf he was sending the spam. Tucker admitted that he had sent the spam but claimed that Pivotal
Payments had nothing to do with it, at which point I attempted to discredit him by bringing up what he'd
said at the last trial:

Me: I wanted to address something that Mr. Tucker said. He sent the faxes saying that he
sent this e-mail but he doesn't think it's a violation. But he has stated under oath, to the court,
at one point: "I don't even sell merchant accounts." Now I want to introduce that statement because
there's a specific rule in the Rules of Evidence,
ER 801, which says--
Judge Eiler: Well, don't quote the Rules of Evidence at me. The Rules of Evidence do not
necessarily apply in Small Claims Court. If I were to apply the Rules of Evidence, we would have
hearings that lasted about 25 seconds. So, don't quote to the rules of Evidence. If you think there's
something that you want to tell me, tell it to me straight out.
Me: All right. I want to challenge the credibility of John Tucker as a witness, because he
has in the past said under oath in court, "I don't even sell merchant accounts."
Judge Eiler: Did he do it in this court?
Me: Yes.
Judge Eiler: Did he do it today?
Me: No. It was under oath.
Judge Eiler: Well, while you may tell me it's under oath, it wasn't in front of me, I'm not going to hear it.
Move on.
Me: Well--
Judge Eiler: Move on.
Me: Do you want the audio?
Judge Eiler: Do you want to move on?

Now there's an odd statement -- "If I were to apply the Rules of Evidence, we would have
hearings that lasted about 25 seconds." In Small Claims, the Rules of Evidence are sometimes relaxed
in the other direction -- evidence that would be excluded from a regular trial is sometimes
allowed to be presented -- but what's the point of making Small Claims more restrictive,
excluding evidence that is explicitly
allowed under the rules?

Largely on the basis of John Tucker's testimony absolving Pivotal Payments, and their claims that they
refused to pay him once they found out he was spamming, I didn't get a judgment against them (I did get
another judgment against John Tucker, although I doubt that he has any assets).
Later John told me on the phone
that Pivotal Payments did pay him the money they owed him after the trial, in
accordance with their agreement with him that he would get paid once they were dismissed from the lawsuit.
If that's the case, then they lied under oath, too.

But with regard to laxity towards spammers lying under oath, she is indeed no worse than any other judge.
Although
Professor Gillers's article
showed it's not true that no one is ever prosecuted for civil perjury, it's no wonder that people think
that's the case, based on the rarity of prosecutions, combined with the outcomes of the two famous cases
that people have heard about.
Bill Clinton was disbarred
from practicing law before the Supreme Court and had his Arkansas law license suspended for five
years, but was never prosecuted;
Kwame
Kilpatrick
was heavily criticized for lying under oath, but only
went to jail
for violating the terms of his bond. The defenders of both men had a point that even if they lied
under oath in a civil case, hardly anyone else ever got punished for that.

In fact, I don't think all perjurers should be prosecuted — Clinton and Kilpatrick were lying to
cover up extra-marital affairs, after all.
When Clinton was asked during Paula Jones's sexual-harassment lawsuit whether he had ever had
a sexual relationship with any other subordinate, if he had answered "Yes" out of the blue
and voluntarily spilled
out all the lurid details about Monica Lewinsky, wouldn't you have thought, "Dude, you could have
just said, 'No'"?
They probably shouldn't have gone to jail for perjury. But the mud-slinging they
endured, as partisan as it was, at least reminded everyone that a rule had
been broken.

The judicial branch can instruct
judges at all levels to take perjury in civil cases seriously — at the very least, judges
should act angry when someone gets caught lying under oath, at least as angrily as they act when
someone interrupts them. That promotes respect for the rule of law, and it doesn't cost anything.
And if some parasite like a spammer gets caught lying, prosecutors may be doing the world a favor
by pressing criminal charges against them.

In other words,
I agree with Thomas Sowell, who responded to defenders of Bill Clinton who said that "everybody"
lies about sex: "Everybody urinates every day, but if you do it in a court of law, you will be
arrested. And then you will be tried by a jury of your PEERS." OK, I made the last part up.

They just have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality.

No, they lie.

I am seeing an increase in spam messages that have a disclaimer at the bottom indicating that "this message was sent by Fox New Corp" with the mailing address of them in NYC, and if I want to opt out I can go to the following link. Of course, the unsubscribe link is on the same site that the spam is directing you to.

This gives the illusion of complying with CANSPAM, but, in reality, it demonstrates how completely toothless CANSPAM really is.

If they can't track down who is actually sending it, then start punishing the companies who are benefiting from it and make them responsible for how their "affiliates" are marketing their products. Because, really, these companies get to act like they're not spamming, but they're benefiting from it. I'm fairly sure that whatever fake "Canadian Pharmacy" these things point to isn't a legitimate business and shouldn't be able to pretend that a bunch of people they don't know are directing "customers" to their web site.

Unfortunately, I don't have any idea of how we're ever going to reduce the amount of spam -- but, by its very nature, spam is almost always dishonest, and often outright fraudulent.

The real problem is that almost *no one* ever gets convicted of perjury. The judges and lawyers keep it that way so when they lie in court, it's hard to convict because you need iron clad proof that they deliberately intended to mislead while under oath. Sorry, but I don't think that will ever change considering the system is build for lawyers.

They just have an extremely casual relationship with objective reality.

I have a friend who I met through a club we were both members of. He isn't a spammer as such, but I think he falls close to this category. He's more of what another friend of my refers to as a crazy-maker. Supposedly it means someone who doesn't really have much perception of reality and what's going on around them, and they'll work really hard to do things their way without realising just how much they're intimidating people around t

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it( ) Users of email will not put up with it( ) Microsoft will not put up with it(x) The police will not put up with it(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email( ) Open relays in foreign countries( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses(x) Asshats(x) Jurisdictional problems(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches(x) Extreme profitability of spam(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft(x) Technically illiterate politicians(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have everbeen shown practical( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation( ) Blacklists suck( ) Whitelists suck( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually( ) Sending email should be free( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome( ) I don't want the government reading my email(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn yourhouse down!

That form wasn't really written to discourage people from doing nasty things to spammers like suing them or keying their cars. These are "feel-good" measures and I approve of feel-good measures. But still, feel-good measures don't amount to solutions to the spam problem. The form was written with the assumption that the problem is probably unsolvable. Anything that works like email, and has the attributes that we

I'll agree with the humor. But it's a sad state of affairs when genuinely interesting arguments are reduced to the drivel of a geek-form response.

There's nothing preventing humor from also making a point. One of the primary purposes of satire is in fact to point out the absurdity of every day things that we might otherwise tend to overlook. In this case the post shows many of the common flaws with anti-SPAM techniques, and in addition to entertaining you for a few moments, should also make you consider the various ways in which SPAM can be combated and which if any of the reasons on the "form" it falls afoul of.

In addition, the sheer length and breadth (and validity) of the form shows what a monumental task combating spam is. Even if you chop out the philosophical section, every one of the possible solution types (technical, legislative, market-driven, vigilante) has several points of failure that render suggested solutions useless.

And even if one were to come up with the best possible solution, the form would still be valid because you can't uncheck "Asshats.";)

All perjury should be punished. It's always a serious crime to knowingly screw up the legal system with lies. If a cop is caught committing perjury, the judge should be empowered to summarily strip him or her of their badge and gun the moment they get off the witness seat. If someone does it to avoid any punishment, their punishment should be automatically doubled, without mercy. If someone bears false witness against a defendant to get them convicted, they ought to be sentenced to the identical punishment that the defendant would have gotten, even up to the death penalty.

When you commit perjury, you are pretty much always denying someone justice. You simply cannot support a conservative enforcement of perjury and then bemoan the increasing lack of justice in the system.

Pretty much. Punishing people who fail to cooperate with the courts or mislead them deliberately need to be punish, in game theoretical terms it suddenly makes it a lot more attractive to tell the truth.
It reminds me of some study about cheating in games, and how cheating goes up a lot slower with increasing number of players if players are punished for not reporting cheating.
Also, being a Brit I get the imperssion that perjury is taken a lot more seriously here - see Jeffrey Archer and all the others w

I wish that witnesses on the stand could ask to 'approach the bench' if they wished to. Or, at the very least, ask for a closed courtroom.

They have the right to remain silent and not to offer testimony that will incriminate them.

[...]Prosecution: Did you have an affairDefendant: ""

If you say nothing your wife will still suspect (at least) if you request a closed session your wife will still suspect. If you're unlucky, even if you answer "Never, I love my wife", your wife will still suspect.

If a cop is caught committing perjury, the judge should be empowered to summarily strip him or her of their badge and gun the moment they get off the witness seat.

But then with all the cops unemployed who would protect the crispy creams of the world?(/joke)I have even had a judge try to make me feel better after finding me guilty (in traffic court) by telling me he knew the cop was lying. IMHO that is somewhat why jury trials (with a good lawyer) usually gets found innocent. When (some/most???) COPS give a

While admirable my own limited experience suggests that prosecuting every act of perjury would be impractical. I've sat on two juries at criminal trials, the second of which was actually a perjury trial. In both trials, a plurality of the eye witnesses called had to be, let's say, "mistaken". That means even a simple trial with say 7 to 10 witnesses total would generate 3 or 4 potential perjury trials.

The perjury trial I sat on was in relation to a homicide, and they basically retried the entire murder a

In Small Claims, the Rules of Evidence are sometimes relaxed in the other direction -- evidence that would be excluded from a regular trial is sometimes allowed to be presented -- but what's the point of making Small Claims more restrictive, excluding evidence that is explicitly allowed under the rules?

You're missing the point I think. Rules of Evidence introduce a level of formality that really would derail small claims court. In standard civil trials it's not uncommon for there to be a half-dozen hearings on evidentiary matters before trial. Plunking down what you claim to be a tape of the defendant would not be allowed; it would have to go on the pretrial exhibit list and both sides would have a copy. The defendant would be able to attack its validity in a pretrial hearing. The judge was in her rights to ignore it in this case.

Well, number one rule in life: don't piss off other people (that you can't afford to).

It is part of the job of people who have been given power over others to do as much as they can to eliminate bias in their decisions.They are human, but they are still expected to behave to a much higher standard than an everyday joe schmoe.

As far as I can see, the only cases where Haselton has actually pissed off a judge (none of which were in this particular article) the judge was clearly acting capricously.

Dealt too much with emotionless machines lately?

Not thought through the consequences of rolling over and just accepting bad governing lately?

It is part of the job of people who have been given power over others to do as much as they can to eliminate bias in their decisions.They are human, but they are still expected to behave to a much higher standard than an everyday joe schmoe.

Agreed.

Not thought through the consequences of rolling over and just accepting bad governing lately?

It's basically an uphill battle. People *are* biased, despite efforts in attempting (to pretend) not to be. That doesn't mean I'm going to stay silent when things to reall

Look, I'm no lawyer. Just a law school student. As a student, I have no time to respond in full, or even truly in part. It's just that bad.

I will say, however, as a bit of caution: there is no easier way to lose a small claims case than to bring a lawyer along with you, with the possible exception of attempting to act like you are an attorney by quoting the rules of evidence.

Judges don't like it, and with reason. Small claims is a simple procedure - evidence is presented, cases are decided in 10 minutes or less (often much less), and the matter goes on. Period.

The rules of evidence are very, very complicated. There's a reason people do hire lawyers, and a good reason to avoid these rules in small claims to keep the courthouse doors open to the people. When you start quoting the rules of evidence to a small claims court judge, don't expect a positive response. As a personal example, my brother-in-law went to small claims court against a party who did decide to bring along an attorney. As the sides began to examine witnesses (a process the judge allowed more to amuse the attorney than out of typical practice), the opposing side's attorney began to object to my brother-in-law's questions. Now, if you've read the rules of evidence, you know it's not easy to form a question that is safe from objection. This is why people hire attorneys to litigate on their behalf. The judge, however, refused to uphold any of the objections and, after overruling three of them, told the attorney to "sit down, shut up, and let the man ask his questions." Unsurprisingly, the side that had not brought an attorney prevailed in a big way.

I would recommend that this gentleman either get an attorney or stop with the cutesieness. Small Claims Judges don't like cutesy. They like simple, straightforward fact. Don't start quoting rules of evidence. Don't contrive ways around recording phone calls. Look up the statute, decide if you meet the basic requirements, and argue a simple, forthright case. Don't say things like "obviously". Don't argue law - argue fact.

Why should spammers be treated differently? You know justice is supposed to be blind, if they prosecute all spammers who perjure in court then they must prosecute EVERYONE who perjures in court. That means if little ol' grandma is getting sued by the RIAA and she says "I never downloaded any music!" but the RIAA produces some log from an ISP showing that her niece e-mailed her some Britney Spears song, well we'd have to persecute grandma for perjury. Judges don't generally want to do that to everyone and

Why should spammers be treated differently? You know justice is supposed to be blind, if they prosecute all spammers who perjure in court then they must prosecute EVERYONE who perjures in court. That means if little ol' grandma is getting sued by the RIAA and she says "I never downloaded any music!" but the RIAA produces some log from an ISP showing that her niece e-mailed her some Britney Spears song, well we'd have to persecute grandma for perjury.

That means if little ol' grandma is getting sued by the RIAA and she says "I never downloaded any music!" but the RIAA produces some log from an ISP showing that her niece e-mailed her some Britney Spears song, well we'd have to persecute grandma for perjury.

Though I agree with your general point regarding equal application of the law, I am going to quibble with the above example. Also, I think you meant "prosecute" and not "persecute".

Black's Law Dictionary defines perjury as "The act or an instance of a person's deliberately making material false or misleading statements while under oath." Assuming a jurisdiction where this definition is used in either the common law or statutory definition of perjury, Granny (or, more likely, her lawyer) might rightfully arg

And the reason why judges (and prosecutors) won't pursue perjury charges is very, very simple: it would increase their workload, and they already have more than they can do in an ordinary 80-hour week.

You can argue till you turn blue and die that enforcement would actually reduce their workload in the great bye-and-bye but it Just Ain't Gonna Happen.

If there aren't resources to effectively enforce a law, that law should be taken off the books. Perhaps they should prioritize, and start prosecuting perjurers instead of pot smokers. That should clear up some space on the docket.

If there aren't resources to effectively enforce a law, that law should be taken off the books.

You're making the totally unfounded assumption that the purpose of a law is to be obeyed. On the contrary, the purpose of many laws is to stroke some group of constituents while remaining secure in the knowledge that the law will never be enforced. CAN-SPAM is a good example, as are the plethora of bills passed each year that are immediately rejected as unconstitutional. Again.

None of the examples you provided are clear, provable examples of perjury. A recording obviously isn't testimony. Maybe he lied to you when you were recording him? He wasn't under oath then. Maybe the guy saying he didn't even sell merchant accounts, didn't sell them at the time, but now he does? If you can think of a plausible scenario where what he said could technically be looked upon as true (even if you and I "know" he's lying), that's a far cry from being able to prove that he perjured himself. Even the case where the guy said the wrong e-mail address isn't quite open-and-shut. Is there really enough evidence to prosecute him? A civil trial has a lower burden of proof than a criminal one. Just because a judge awards you judgment(believing the defendant was lying) doesn't mean there's enough evidence to convict him of perjury.

Can you prove, beyond reasonable doubt that he was lying, that he knew he was lying, and that the statement that contradicted the lie (e.g. the recorded telephone calls) were not actually misinformation to prevent a potential competitor from stealing his way of doing things?

I've been to small claims court. The plaintiff said "He hasn't given me a dime". I said "I have the a copy of the cleared check right here". Guess what? The judge DID NOT CARE that she was lying! In any given small claims case, the judge assumes both sides are lying equally and splits the difference (the judge arbitrarily made me pay about half the amount she was requesting -- really! To this day, I have no idea where he came up with the number.) Which means if you go in there and simply TELL THE TRUTH, you

But the real point is that even if the judge did think the recording was inadmissible, couldn't he have still said something like, "Well, if the court did admit this evidence, and if these defendants were here, then they could very well be arrested for perjury -- if they were here, I'd tell them that they just had a really close call."

Do you know what "inadmissible" means?

It's just as likely, and appropriate, for the Judge to say, "Well, if the defendant was found in a room holding a knife standing over a dead body which had just been stabbed to death, then they could very well be arrested for murder."

A spammer who lived in Washington appeared in court and claimed that he had never sent the spam in question and wouldn't know how. I then produced a tape recording of another conversation in which I had talked to him on the phone, again pretending to be an interested customer, and he talked about sending the mails from a server in China to make it harder for people in the U.S. to block them.

Did the defence council object on the basis that you broke Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by not diclosing this information?

A Seattle-area judge has been accused of routinely interrupting litigants and lawyers and addressing them in a manner that is "angry, disdainful, condescending and/or demeaning."

The state Commission on Judicial Conduct claims in a statement of charges (PDF) that Judge Judith Eiler treated lawyers and self-represented litigants in a way that is "rude, impatient, undignified and intimidating," the Tacoma News Tribune reports.

Eiler underwent behavior therapy with an emphasis on sensitivity training after she received a reprimand in 2005 for impatient and rude behavior, the story says.

The way the she deals with people in her court shows that she should retire from the bench and do something else. Like become a correctional officer or something.

Stop posting these long-winded inexpert screeds on the law. You simply don't know what you're talking about as demonstrated repeatedly in article after article, and you do a great disservice to the Slashdot community by foisting your uninformed opinion on us as fact.

Let me point out two parts of Washington law that you might not be aware of that I was able to dig up with mere Google searches (and no need of Westlaw or any other expensive legal tools):

The judge still said I couldn't use it as evidence in Washington. This raises an interesting question. My understanding is that the rules of evidence in Washington don't say "You can't use a secretly taped phone call as evidence."

Perhaps you should look at RCW 9.73.050 [wa.gov]. While the court doesn't have jurisdiction to see you fined or prosecuted for actions taken outside of the state completely that would be a violation RCW 9.73.030 [wa.gov], they are not obligated to treat your out of state acts as not an ones that would be proscribed. You can't do an end-run around evidentiary rules that way. Note how nothing in the statute requires either party to be in Washington to count as a violation under the section 030 definitions referenced in 050. You conversation, therefore, still meets the exclusion rule.

Evidence are sometimes relaxed in the other direction -- evidence that would be excluded from a regular trial is sometimes allowed to be presented -- but what's the point of making Small Claims more restrictive, excluding evidence that is explicitly allowed under the rules?

Evidence rules are normally relaxed in Small Claims Court for two reasons:1) To keep the court proceedings simple for non-lawyers.2) To keep the case from becoming overly long and complicated.

It seems like the second rationale controlled here. Whether you think that's right or not is a matter for Washington voters to fix and not grounds to question the moral integrity of the judges before everyone. The judge may have well only been doing what the law requires. See RCW 12.40.090 [wa.gov] mandating informal hearings "with the sole object of dispensing speedy and quick justice between the litigants."

Small claims court is a different animal from real court. It's supposed to be court without need for lawyers. One of the consequences of that is that it doesn't follow all the rules. You've made an impressive effort to learn Washington law, but you haven't researched the problem deeply enough, so please stop writing these screeds about how awful your local judges are.

Lastly, your article once again reached its conclusion very early on and should've stopped there:

The traditional cost-benefit analysis of prosecuting people who lie under oath in a civil trial, is that it's just not worth it.

Since the title of this article is that that's not true and you haven't really provided any evidence the cost-benefit analysis is any different (instead of rehashing whining about how small claims court didn't go your way AGAIN), the rest of this article should've been cut.

I rather enjoyed the poster's comments and read them fully, as I did his previous postings.

His overall tone and conclusion is that the system doesn't work for us common folk, which reflects my own experience with the court system.

It's a simple problem in game theory: people will do the least amount of work for the maximum amount of gain. As applied to judges (or any government employee), that means showing up late, not bothering to read paperwork, and generally opting for the shortest path to going home ear

Most people don't know how the legal system works, yet pounds on it by being unfair etc. Well, the details _are_ complex, but getting a general understanding is not really that hard. What makes it harder for normal people to understand the system is these induhviduals pretending to know about law yet knowing shitte, and spreading misleading information make the general populace more misinformed.

Not quite. It's even more restrictive than that.Perjury is lying under oath about things that is material (i.e. important) to the case.

The reason for this is simple. If there wasn't a rule like this, every court case about a fender-bender auto accident would begin with: "have you ever cheated on your spouse?". With wide-eyed hubby/wifey in the front row, the inclination to lie would be overwhelming, and court cases would be lost in the weeds over long ago affairs.

The entire quote at the top of this article seems ludicrous. Yes we all think spammers are scum, but this article is a waste of space. These days just about anyone who thinks they can get away with it will lie under oath when it suits them.

It seems to me that Mr.Haselton has admirable goals, but arguing with judges about your improper legal procedure isn't going to work. Does he need to go to law school, hire a real lawyer, or what? Surely somebody here is a lawyer and can explain how Haselton (and others of us who might be so inclined) ought to go about suing spammers?

I'm not a lawyer either (and I don't ANAL), but I do have some experience with the legal system. I've been in court a dozen or so times, as defendant, plaintiff, and witness, in criminal, civil, and small claims trials. Aside from traffic court, I haven't lost a case. (The first time I was in court was for a traffic case. I lost because I was wearing shorts and sandals.)

One thing I've learned is that a little humility goes a long way.

For instance, instead of introducing an illegal tape recording with "Un

In fact, I don't think all perjurers should be prosecuted -- Clinton and Kilpatrick were lying to cover up extra-marital affairs, after all.

That is when you blew it. All perjurers should be prosecuted. That Clinton and Kilpatrick were covering up extra-marital affairs is irrelevant.

The two biggest problems with the laws today is that there are too many of them and that people wish to pick and choose which laws to enforce when. Either one enforces the law or one doesn't. Either the l

The article's author talks about hosting providers having "secret agreements" with spammers or other complicity. THIS is the leverage needed to hobble spammers.

Spam is almost *always* a come-on for some fraudulent enterprise (stock schemes, fake/illegal pills, or other outright identity theft or fraud). In order to perpetrate frauds like this on an ongoing basis, you need complicity with: hosting providers, credit card processors, banks, and various other middle men.

What's needed are RICO prosecutions that demonstrate this complicity so that the *entire chain* can be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise. Once a few spammers and their secret partners go down in a RICO prosecution ($250k fines, 20 pound-me-in-the-ass years in federal prison) you can believe that these businesses operating in the shadows and providing legitimate business support for spammers and their clients will seriously second guess their involvement in this and decide that 20 long years in prison and crippling financial penalties and forfeitures just isn't worth it for whatever pocket change they get from some guy who wants to send spam.

Spam just doesn't work as a purely underground phenomenon, it requires complicity with the "legitimate" world in order to process payments, send email and so on. If you cut that air supply off or make it much more expensive, you may make the margin small enough that it stops being viable.

Will it stop everything? Of course not, but it will make what's left far easier to isolate.

That fact that it is such an obvious racketeering case and we've never seen a RICO prosecution leads me to believe there's just too much money being made by the spammers "air supply" generally above-board business partners.

Small claims doesn't require a lawyer, and most people in small claims don't get one. You can only sue for up to something like $5,000 in small claims. It costs that much just to look a a lawyer. It's not worth hiring one to argue over the couple hundred bucks you're getting sued for. So... you're wrong.

Ahh, then you agree with the MPAA and their tactics of doing whatever it takes to get the people in court, right?

First of all, I haven't said I agreed with him in the first place. I couldn't lie to spammers like that, but it's definitely closer to this side of the gray area than the dark side.

Next, let's eliminate the identity you're describing. The RIAA lies on legal documents to coerce people into court. He didn't use the telephone conversation to get them into court, he used the spam to get them into cou

if you're implying that drug users are all failures, you're sadly mistaken. even if we incorrectly assume that alcohol isn't a drug because it's legal, there are an endless list of people who are evidence of the contrary:

Steve Jobs (lsd)

Bill Gates (lsd)

The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Ray Charles, and just about every other well known musician.

but why should it bother you what someone else does in their free time when it doesn't effect you in any way?

Apparently most crime is drug related.

Whether it's kids breaking into your house and stealing stuff to pay off a drugs habit, or youths robbing you at knife point (we don't have many guns here thankfully) to pay off a drug habit,.. drugs have a tendency to wide reaching effects. Yes I speak from experience.

We have this thing called society, it impacts everyone in it.

If you're enjoying pot in your bedroom, you're funding someone who is selling drugs, they don't care if people are getting robbed to pay for t

Whether it's kids breaking into your house and stealing stuff to pay off a drugs habit, or youths robbing you at knife point (we don't have many guns here thankfully) to pay off a drug habit,.. drugs have a tendency to wide reaching effects. Yes I speak from experience.

And if the drugs were legalized, they'd be cheaper. And if they were cheaper, then people would be less likely to have to resort to crime to pay for them!

There are two choices: either drugs are legal, or they are illegal. They will always ex

Legalised drugs just cause other problems.. witness the most widely used recreational drugs (except caffeine) - nicotine and ethanol. They don't exactly shine as examples of why drug use should be extended. You can argue personal choice, but those who do not wish to live in an anarchic system and instead maintain social structure and cohesion tend to prefer that drugs are illegalised [I think I made that word up].

One other issue is that with free supply it's likely that drug production would push out food

They don't exactly shine as examples of why drug use should be extended. You can argue personal choice, but those who do not wish to live in an anarchic system and instead maintain social structure and cohesion...

But illegal drugs are worse for the social structure, because you get a whole bunch of ancillary crime that's not caused by the drugs themselves, but merely the fact that they're illegal. If you could buy pot at the 7-11, then you'd put not only the local dealer, but the whole smuggling infrastruct

For every one person that's launched to superstardom despite (or even because of, I'll admit) taking drugs, there are plenty of people who ruined their brains, bodies, and eventually lives taking drugs.

Of my friends in high school, all the ones I knew who were heavily into drug use ended up either as burger-flippers coasting through life, homeless, or in jail.

maybe it's correlation and not causation, I don't know. I'm still pretty disdainful of druggies though.

Interesting, and I expect you to get a lot of replies, but I read it as "How is a person who fights against spam (spam warrior) like a person who fights against drugs (drug warrior)" and the answer is that both are fighting a battle that can not be won given human nature.

Just like the 'war on spam' is just like the 'war on drugs' is just like the 'war on terror' is just like the 'war on people who drive to fast' is just like the 'war on people who take things that arn't theirs' is just like the 'war on obes

it's mostly a formality for ceremonial purposes. i guess some theists believe that placing your hand on a bible invokes a sacred witness, thus compelling the person to speak the truth.

here's an interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:

As late as 1880, Charles Bradlaugh was denied a seat in parliament since because of his professed atheism he was judged unable to swear the Oath of Allegiance in spite of his proposal to swear the oath as a "matter of form".